


Transience

by aleksandermorozova



Category: The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Gen, Will Add Tags As They Become Relevant, probably future shippy prompts, written with prompts from the community 50scene's table, young!darkling is a thing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 20:44:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5512706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aleksandermorozova/pseuds/aleksandermorozova
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Death is a weight we carry. </p><p>[50 scenes challenge wip.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ash

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: [01/50] from the 50scenes prompt table on lj, Hero.  
> Character: Aleksander Morozova, age 15.  
> Fandom: Grisha Trilogy.  
> Rating: T

He watches.

It is almost, but not quite, instinct now. He can hear his mother’s voice like a drill in the back of his skull as he takes in his surroundings.  

_What do you see? What do you hear?  You need to open more than your eyes, boy, to understand the world clearly._

His lashes move with the faint flicker of his eyelids, gray gaze darting to take the scene in. His heart is hammering in his chest like a war drum, cheeks flushed from the bitter cold as he pushes himself flatter against the snowbank, tree bark digging into his sides. He can’t feel his hands, he thinks, which is dangerous. But not as dangerous as being burned alive.

He counts his breaths. Listens.

Voices intermingle several yards away. The Grisha camp he and his mother had been staying at for the past two days is now laid in ruins, the tents overturned and set ablaze. A grisha girl’s doll— _Nina’s_ , his mind supplies uselessly—was laid out in the snow, damp from where the embers had melted the ice to chilly water, crystals forming on the ends of its curled hair. Nina was younger than him by a few years. Seven years old and naive. He remembers envying the untainted brightness in her big blue eyes, almost resenting it.

He lets himself regret that now, for just a moment, as some of the voices raise to become shrill screams of terror.

He can’t see them through the black smoke, but he doesn’t have to in order to know what’s going on. There are other voices among the panic, rumbling Fjerdan— which has finally, on his own tongue, become more than passable—barking orders left and right.

“Separate them,” One sharp voice demands. “Bind their hands. Don’t let the witches use their craft. Where is the wood? I told you to be _prepared_. How are we to raise fires without sufficient supplies?”

“There are more than we thought.” A younger sounding voice this time. “More young ones than we counted on. They usually do not survive so well out in—”

“It’s no matter,” The leader interrupts. “There are other ways to kill abominations.”

The words ignite two very different feelings within him. First there is anger, as there is always anger, burning bright and making the puffs of breath he exhales come out in uneven bursts. He has to grit his teeth to hold back— _something_. There is violence in him, now; there has been ever since he learned The Cut.

 _Death is a weight we carry_ , mother’s voice comes to him again. _And we must carry it time and time again. We must do what we can to survive._

Beneath the anger, however, exists something younger—something still raw within him that age has not quite yet robbed him of.

Fear.

When he shakes, Aleksander tells himself it's the chill. That he is brave. There is no room for cowardice in a world like this.

 _Then why hide?_ A cruel voice whispers from the back of his mind. Mother’s assertive tone briskly pushes it away.

 _Hiding from the enemy when overpowered is not cowardice_ , he knows she’d say. _It’s having a brain. I don’t want to find you laid out and dead one day because you tried to play at being a hero._

Aleksander is tired of hiding, tired of going place to place and watching people become dust. There is so much forgetting instead of remembering. He does not want to build his someday home from ash—but he will, if he has to. If the screams and cries of the Grisha can be avenged by no other route. But to do this, he has to live. He has to survive.

_Death is a weight we carry._

So he burrows further into the snow, lips blue, body trembling. 

He waits. He does not close his eyes. Does not cover his ears even as the first fire is set and the smell of cooked flesh begins to permeate the air, pleading gasps and animal-sound screeches wrapping around him like a noose.


	2. Grave

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: [02/50] from the 50scenes prompt table on lj, Grave.   
> Character: Baghra Morozova.   
> Fandom: Grisha Trilogy.   
> Rating: T

She could not remember a moment in her long life where she could truly say she’d been given rest.

Her childhood had been rife with insecurities; a crooked heart in a crooked home. She’d been old long before she’d hit the years of 50, 80, 100—had realized, along the way, that people who were ‘different’ did not get to ever truly be young. Loss had guided her way for most of her life. It had been an excuse, she supposed, to allow her selfishness. Her own child had come into the world on a whim.

That wasn’t her mistake. She could never see him as a mistake, not even now—not even as he stumbled over himself, bringing everything he’d built to ruin.

The mistake had been thinking she and he were the same. She had miscalculated something along the way. Perhaps—yes, perhaps it had begun the night she’d first laid with that man. 

He’d been warm bodied, powerful. He’d not treated her like glass. They’d used each other and she’d left when she’d gotten what she wanted. Knew, even if she had stayed, that there was nothing there waiting for her—for _them_ —when the man would only wither and age. If he even survived the night with all the people of the world wanting their kind dead.

It had seemed the right choice. It had been the only choice. Yet she could not help but wonder if she had assumed too much. If her own self-sufficiency in the absence—the ignorance and _lack_ —of her own father had made her think Aleksander, too, had needed no one but her. Had her desire to be less alone brought her own child a similar misery? 

She condemned the monsters he made, but she understood. Just as he had given away a piece of himself to cling to what he had left, she had done the same for him. Had let the thing that had defined her, empowered her, and secluded her whittle away until it was just a memory aching in her bones.

Now, she mused as the nichevo’ya’s muzzle slid beneath her hands, she would give up the rest.

She would sleep when she was dead.


End file.
